MTP Transcript for Nov. 25

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: The war in Iraq, Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, Democrat Ike Skelton, and two retired generals, Barry McCaffrey and Wayne Downing. We try to put it in perspective, after this station break.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: Today marks the 1,347^th day of the war in Iraq, which is the exact length of direct U.S. involvement in the Second World War. Yet in Iraq, there is still no end in sight. Joining us now to discuss the current situation, the chairman and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressmen Duncan Hunter and Ike Skelton; and retired generals Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey. Welcome all.

And I’ll begin with the grim statistics. To date, U.S. military deaths, as we see on the screen, 2,865. U.S. military wounded, 21,778. Iraqi civilian deaths at least 50,000 and several hundred over the last 48 hours, which led to Tom Ricks’ piece in The Washington Post which wrote this, “The Pentagon’s closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.

“Insiders have dubbed the options ‘Go Big,’ ‘Go Long’ and ‘Go Home.’”

Congressman Hunter, is that about it?

REP. DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA): Well, actually there’s another one that, that I’ve recommended to the president, Tim, and that’s this: Go Iraqi. Right now you’ve got 114 Iraqi battalions trained and equipped, and we, we’ve spent a lot of time getting them equipment, standing them up. And of--33 of those battalions are in, in provinces where there are less than one attack a day occurring right now. So you’ve got, out of 18 provinces, you’ve got about half of them, about nine of them, that have almost no action, that are very quiet. You’ve got 33 Iraqi battalions in those area. Saddle those guys up, move them into the fight, get them into the Baghdad area, a couple of the other areas, Samarra, where you have a lot of action occurring.

And that does a couple of things. One, it stands up the Iraqi forces, because nothing trains a combat unit better than actually being in military operations. So that gives them unit cohesiveness, develops leaders. And the most important thing is, Tim, when the, when the ministry of defense picks up the phone and orders and Iraqi colonel to saddle up his battalion and move into the fight, if that colonel refuses to do it or, or wants to, to delay, you need to know that and you reach into the fighting battalions where they are having successes and you pull field-grade officers out of those places and you move them into that battalion and you move them into the fight.

So, so standing up the Iraqi forces is the key here upon which all else depends. If you had an Iraqi force today that was stood up that could stabilize that country, we’d be on the way out right now.

MR. RUSSERT: But we don’t. That’s the point.

REP. HUNTER: Well, but the point is we haven’t moved all the Iraqi forces into the fight. So what we could do right now before we decide whether we want to increase or decrease or maintain the level of American forces, before you make those decisions, let’s take the forces we’ve already trained, we’ve already equipped, which are 50 miles away in some cases, move them into the fight, see how they carry that security burden. And, and after we get a, we get a handle on how well they’re doing, then we can make adjustments on the American force level.

MR. RUSSERT: Congressman Skelton, what do you think?

REP. IKE SKELTON (D-MO): I think that it’s up to us to do the very best we can to train and advise those battalions and brigades of the Iraqi forces. I also think that we’re going to have to send a message to the Maliki government, to the Iraqi people, as well as to the American people, that we’re not there forever and it’s in the law that we redeploy this year. That would begin it this year. I also...

MR. RUSSERT: When you say redeploy, what does that mean?

REP. SKELTON: That means take troops from Iraq, maybe bring them back to the United States, take them to Kuwait, Germany, and if you needed them for a very quick mission you could bring them back for another.

The third thing I think you have to do is convene a conference of the entire region. You have to get Iraq zeroed in on Iran, on Syria and the other states in the region. On October the 20^th the Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and I and several others sent a letter to the president spelling this out. And it’s been said the Democrats are all over the place and I have a proposal myself of re—or redeploying one American brigade for every three Iraqi brigades that are brought up to the top level.

But be that as it may, we all agree on the one thing, and I think the key is getting the Iraqis trained and fully advised. Now at Fort Riley, Kansas, there is an ongoing effort to train American soldiers to go over there and do this even better. The problem has been a lot of the trainers, great Americans, but they were not trained to be trainers. That’s what special forces do and that’s what special, specially trained people do. But the average combat soldier in America was trained to do combat duty. He wasn’t trained to be a trainer.

MR. RUSSERT: The problem is how acute this crisis is. Let me show you a dispatch from Reuters. “Violence in Iraq has reached alarming levels, the United Nations said in a report that painted a grim picture of a country gripped by sectarian and ethnic bloodshed that has killed and displaced thousands. ...

“The report says worsening security and increasing poverty has caused ‘unparalleled’ population movement. It estimate 100,000 people leave Iraq every month and more than two million people, about 8 percent of the population, have fled their homes since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The monthly immigration is equivalent to a million American going abroad and a loss to the U.S. economy for a city the size of Detroit every four weeks.” General McCaffrey, how long do we have to stabilize Iraq, and how do we do it?

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